Shortening Turnaround Times for Newborn HIV Testing in Rural Tanzania: A Report from the Field

Points• Early diagnosis of infants infected perinatally with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa depends on completion of multiple steps for results to reach an infant's caregivers in a timely manner.• This project, designed by a pediatric HIV nurse in Tanzania, applied sequential quality improvement interventions to reduce the lengthy turnaround time between dried blood collection from exposed infants and return of test results.• Low-cost interventions successfully reduced the turnaround time from 55 to 38 days, and increased the number of results given to caregivers to >90%.• This work can serve as a model for implementation to improve identification of HIVinfected infants in other resource-poor settings.